1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an improved data processing system and, more particularly, to an improved initialization process.
2. Description of Related Art
Data processing systems (computers) have become fixtures in many aspects of modern life. For example, modern banking would be near impossible without computers to process vast amounts of transactions daily. These computers contain vast numbers of resources, such as, for example, disk drives, other input/output devices, memory components, and processors. Furthermore, with the enormous growth of the Internet, computers have found many other uses, both for business as well as personal use. The information contained on the Internet is stored on computers called web servers. Web servers, just like the computers used for banks, often contain vast numbers of resources to handle all of the web traffic to a particular web site. Booting (i.e. initializing) computers such as these often takes an enormous amount of time.
For example, in many data processing system, during the boot process, information is gathered on all the bootable devices in the data processing system. Bootable devices include scsi disks, ssa disks, tape, cd-rom and network adapters. Every time the data processing system encounters an ssa adapter, the data processing system must execute the ssa adapter""s on-card firmware in which the firmware discovers all the disks attached to the ssa adapter and creates nodes for each disk since each disk is a potential bootable device. This procedure takes a long time, especially for data processing systems with 100s-1000s of ssa disks.
Later on in the boot-up, the user may access a menu and choose which of the devices from a list of bootable devices off of which to boot. This list includes all of the SSA disks along with the scsi disks, network devices, cd-rom, tape, etc. The user now must scroll through a long list of items to get to the desired item off of which to boot the data processing system. Very few users boot their data processing systems off of SSA disks. However, a large number of users utilize data processing systems that have SSA disks. Thus, the time factor becomes a human factor issue. Therefore, it would be desirable to have a method of booting a data processing system that was not as time consuming as the method currently utilized.
The present invention provides a method, system, and apparatus for customizing procedures to be performed during an initialization process in a data processing system. In one embodiment, a class of procedures to omit during the initialization process is determined. This class of procedures may be for example, the omission of identifying and creating nodes for a certain class of drives, such as, for example, all ssa drives. Once procedures to omit from the initialization process are determined, then all other initialization procedures are performed except, of course, for the procedures belonging to the class of procedures determined to be omitted.